100 Days of Game Dev Challenge

I haven’t been doing enough game dev lately, that’s for sure. I wanted something I could commit to, a way to challenge myself and maintain accountability. I’ve seen a couple 100 Day challenges floating around, and wondered if there was a game dev one. Seemed like a good way to commit to a working spree! So I looked up the hashtag and found nothing but a few posts from 2017. I wanted to do a game dev challenge but to have it be more than just me working in a bubble. So I thought I’d put some feelers out there, and sent out a tweet:

Anyone want to start a #100daysofGameDev challenge with me? We can include everything from coding to art to music and marketing!

There's 118 days left until Jan 1 2020 – so we can start in 18 days and finish the year strong!

What do you think? #gamedev #indiedev

— Auliyaa's Games 🌿 (@AuliyaasGames) September 5, 2019

It got a way bigger response than I ever expected. It seemed like a lot of people were interested in joining me in this game dev challenge.

Then my creative cogs started turning. Why not gamify a game dev challenge? The purpose of this isn’t really to complete 100 days in a row… it’s to encourage people consistently coming back to work on their projects. It’s to build a community of game developers to support each other. It’s to learn and grow and share our projects and build up some hype around our games in the process.

So I started planning, and here’s what I came up with.

Game Dev Challenge Guidelines

Goal: Work on any aspect of game development every day for the next 100 days.

This challenge is meant to be as inclusive and realistic as possible – there is so much more to game development than just coding.

All of the following activities count toward the challenge:

- Programming
- Art & concept art
- Modelling
- Marketing
- Game design & planning
- Utility/tool building
- Music & SFX
- Business/Admin
- Writing
- Testing

Things that (unfortunately) don’t count:

- Watching a tutorial (but not actually doing it)
- Chatting with others about game dev
- Playing video games

-> You are not required to start a new game/project for this.

-> You are not required to finish your game.

-> Open to all skill levels

Participation

To participate, share your daily activity in the #daily-updates channel

- Please try to keep it to one post per day.  
- Be sure to include what day of your challenge it is.
- Screenshots and gifs are encouraged! 
- You can share also share a link to a tweet as your daily activity. 

Use the #100DaysofGameDev hashtag on twitter and instagram. Moderation of this will be quite lite – basically, we trust you when you say you did a thing. If you feel like lying, go for it, but that’s your karma.

Above all: The purpose of this is challenge to encourage each other to work on our games, share our progress, and congratulate each other on our small successes! If someone misses a day, it’s up to us to encourage that person to get back on the wagon and keep going

Badges

Badges and roles will be rewarded for different milestones accomplished. Each badge will be revealed as the milestones are hit. You are not required to do game development every single day to earn a badge! We don’t want to encourage stuff like crunch time and stressful deadlines or anything – this is meant to be fun and productive! So each day you do some game dev, just post your update. If you miss a day, don’t post an update. When you start up again, continue from where you left off. You will get the badge after you complete x days of game dev, regardless of how many days you take off in-between. Milestones occur on the following days:

7 days
14 days
30 days
50 days
75 days
100 days

No Crunching!

You are not required to do game dev every single day to earn a badge.

We don’t want to encourage stuff like crunch time and stressful deadlines or anything – this is meant to be fun and productive! So each day you do some game dev, just post your update. If you miss a day, don’t post an update. When you start up again, continue from where you left off. You will get the badge after you complete x days of game dev, regardless of how many days you take off in-between.

This also means you can join the challenge whenever you like.

We have new friends joining every single day. It doesn’t matter where you are in your process, or how fast or slow you work. If you’re in game dev and you’re looking for a community, this place is for you 🙂

Join us!

I made a discord server for all participants, and if you are reading this you are welcome to join I consider this an extension of the Game Dev Friend’s Club. It’s an amazing community so far – every in is mega positive and encouraging and kind.

We also have a special role for spectators who don’t want to do the challenge, so please don’t hesitate to join. You are still an important part of the community <3

See you there!

If you have any questions, feel free to comment them below, tweet me @juul1a or ask away in the discord server. I’m always happy to chat. Until then, much love and happy devving!

Julia